Trucks diverted by rail pull points problem

[Zanotirn]

I generally use a basic system of rail for intercity logistics and trucks for local transport. In most cases the new city locations are already connected by road which was either pre-existing or that I built for my advancing forces. So usually most of intercity rail is built on top of roads (which the game encourages since you get a discount on rail construction this way).

However in actual use it seems to create problems as often a large part of the truck fleet ends up going via rail route where they aren't doing much good. Traffic signs in theory allow you to selectively block truck traffic, the problem is that most of the actual truck points are allocated based on pull points from other cities (which are already serviced by rail), and there is no way that I see to control pull points for trucks and rail separately. So I may end up with a city that allocates 800 of its truck station's points duplicating the rail route that is already well saturated in the immediate area (even if there are bottlenecks further away) while the roads servicing nearby targets get 5 truck points.

There's two solutions that I can see, neither of which is optimal. One is using pull points traffic sign, which can mess up with rail traffic, particularly if these traffic signs end up in many cities. The other is rearranging roads so that rail and truck roads don't use the same routes, which increases the construction costs and leads to more messy networks (plus goes against what the game seems to encourage you to do).

I wonder if anyone found a more elegant solution to this.

[zgrssd]

Could this be the same problem as this one?
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4992603

[Zanotirn]

On the surface it doesn't seem to be the case. In that thread the roads are dead-ends only supplying units. The logistics log doesn't mention pull points at all, it's just truck points. In my case the problem is that with truck road going along the rail for a while, the truck points are getting diverted towards a large number of pull points further along the rail.

[Zanotirn]

To provide some illustrations:

ibb.co/k1nx8kP - you can see that the city in question has a level 1 truck station, but the only nearby roads that are not along the rail are getting single-digit logistics points

ibb.co/K6Bfvjk - the logistics log for the city says that 800 truck points were pulled along the rail in one batch.

Edit: another screenshot from the point where the first purely truck road diverges from the truck-rail line.
ibb.co/CJ8q4Vd
The 100 pull points on the truck road are competing against 5K+ pull points on the rail line from the cities further south. So only a small number of truck points is actually sent along the truck road, even if the trucks are not needed to serve the far cities, this is the rail's job.

[deMangler]

ORIGINAL: Zanotirn

...and there is no way that I see to control pull points for trucks and rail separately....

I think this is the thing. It may be that it works as intended, but certainly either separating truck and rail totally or connecting them at points (transfer yards?) would be (simpler?)
I would have intuitively done the same as you, however - now that you have pointed this out I am not going to be making that assumption.
There is just so much connectedness in this game I can see how there would be a huge reluctance to tweak something like this.

[redrum68]

Can you upload the save game?

[Zanotirn]

ORIGINAL: redrum68

Can you upload the save game?

gofile.io/d/7Vxtyj

There's several roads like this e.g. around Carlin and Indrus

[redrum68]

Interesting. I think you have a few things that are causing the behavior you're seeing.

The first one is that you don't have nearly enough logistics points in your capital meaning that it is your major bottleneck:

[redrum68]

The second issue is you have massive resource stockpiles in cities (5k, 3k, etc) causing very high pull points as they want to ship those stocks back to your SHQ:

[redrum68]

Third issue is you want to avoid building additional logistics assets on the main road/rail lines as it will cause lots of points to be lost to refocusing. Here you can see the rail station that is NW of the capital moves 2.8k into the capital but then only 2.1k SE of that because of refocusing so it lost 25% right off the bat. Its better to put these off 1 hex branches of the main lines:

[redrum68]

To fix the immediate problem, I set each city with a huge stockpile to just have 500 pull points:

[redrum68]

Now adding a few traffic signals to limit to just pull points on the small branches gives what I believe is your desired behavior:

[redrum68]

Now long term, you need to do a few things to actually tackle your major logistics/stockpile issue:
1. Build more logistics points in your capital as its the bottleneck
2. Build more logistics points in the cities immediately around your capital so they can feed points back towards your capital
3. Stop building new production buildings in cities outside your capital that generate resources that require logistics points (metal, rare metal, food, etc) to ship back so your stockpiles don't keep growing until you work through the stockpiles you have

[redrum68]

Here is the save game with the few adjustments I made as a quick example of the short term fixes: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EWntFc ... sp=sharing

Hope that helps.

[Zanotirn]

I hoped to set up logistics largely with high speed rail, but the hi-tech parts were a bottleneck even in a ruin-heavy world, and the supplementary rail stations were not ready yet.

Thank you, it helps to understand that in a way setting up the logistics without bottlenecks will alleviate this issue as well. And thanks for the advice on logistics. I'm still not sure the game the game should let bottlenecks in one place lead to this behavior in other parts, but at least I can see the workaround.